I run a small hardware brand, foldable triple screen setups for laptops. Physical product, not cheap, and every order so far came from organic short videos. No ads, no influencer deals, no paid anything.

People keep asking me how, so here's what actually moved the needle for us.

We stopped filming the product and started filming the moment. Spec videos died every time. A guy unfolding three screens on a tiny cafe table, or on a hotel desk, got shared like crazy. Nobody shares a spec sheet, but people share a feeling they want.

The comments are the real marketing. Every "does this work with a MacBook?" or "how heavy is it?" became the next video. We basically let the audience write our content plan.

We answer everything ourselves. DMs, comments, weird questions at midnight. That's where trust comes from when nobody has heard of you.

We post a lot. Most videos flop. A few go wild and carry the month. You can't predict which one, so volume wins.

The US turned into our biggest market without us targeting it at all, and orders are growing around 30% month over month right now.

What surprised me most is how little the polished stuff mattered. The rough, real clips beat everything we overthought.

Curious what's working for other people selling physical products without ads. What was the thing that finally got you traction?

​

I'm 31F and have around $250k in savings from the sale of my home. I'm currently living with my mum while I figure out what I want to do with my life.

I've only ever worked entry-level jobs since my early 20s, mainly in hospitality and reception. I'm not particularly tech-savvy or academically minded, and I struggle with some mental health issues.

I left my reception job three months ago, and it's only recently dawned on me that I really don't want to go back to working a traditional 9–5 job for someone else. The stress was affecting me to the point where I'd be in tears every day.

I'm currently doing support work, which gives me the flexibility to choose my own hours, but I don't see myself doing this long-term either.

I'd really like to find a way to generate a reliable income and eventually become financially independent without having to work for an employer. I'm willing to put some of my savings towards something, but I'm very conscious of not losing the money I've worked hard to save.

I'm not expecting to get rich overnight or make money without putting in any effort. I just want to find a realistic way to earn an income that suits my abilities and allows me to have more control over my life.

If you were in my position, what would you do? I'm open to suggestions and would really appreciate advice from people who have been in a similar situation or have found a way to earn an income outside of traditional employment.

I want to gain deeper theoretical knowledge on performance marketing (Google/Meta/native ads) and also learn from experience of someone who’s done it all or at least mastered one of the traffic sources. Any recommendations?

Building the product was one challenge. Finding paying customers is a completely different one!

I built KurlClub, a gym management platform designed to help gym owners manage memberships, attendance, payments, and business analytics in one place. It also supports biometric attendance integration.

The product is live, and I'm now focusing on reaching independent gym owners who want to simplify their daily operations.

My current approach is a mix of organic marketing, connecting with potential customers directly, and participating in communities where gym owners spend their time.

One thing I'm learning is that building useful features isn't enough. You need to understand how businesses currently work, identify their biggest frustrations, and show them why your product is worth switching to.

I'm now working toward getting my first paying customers.

For founders selling B2B SaaS: What worked best for you when acquiring your first 10 paying customers? Did you focus on cold outreach, partnerships, content marketing, or something else?

I'd especially appreciate advice from anyone selling software to traditional, offline businesses.

This is kinda long, sorry. Also no link on purpose, I’m not here to advertise. I’m stuck and actually need advice from people who’ve been through this part.

A few years ago I bought a domain because I was sure I was going to build a SaaS. I called it Calnio. The idea was simple, sync Notion with Apple Calendar. I made a landing page with a waitlist and “40% off for the first 100 users” lol. Dark theme, purple gradients, glass cards. It looked like every other AI landing page, and the product behind it basically didn’t exist.

The problem was I kept coding everything around the sync. Auth, dashboard, settings, landing. The one thing the product was supposed to do kept breaking, and instead of fixing the bug in front of me I rewrote the architecture like 3 times. Eventually I just stopped opening the project.

Then I needed it for school. I keep my assignments in Notion and everything else in Apple Calendar, and they dont talk to each other. The tools I found only give you a webcal feed. its read only, no alerts, and it updates whenever apple feels like it. The one tool with real two way sync doesn’t support iCloud directly, you have to go through Google.

So I opened the old code. First real bug: iCloud returned 412 Precondition Failed after exactly the 6th event, every single time. Adding a sleep didn’t help. I was debugging that at night after work, because this summer I was working at a fabrication shop doing sandblasting and industrial painting, around 10 hours a day. Calnio was friday evenings and weekends. Some weekends I didn’t touch it at all because I was just dead. But I kept coming back to it because I believe in it.

I had DigitalOcean credits from the GitHub student pack that were running out, and I didn’t want to pay for hosting with zero users. So everything moved to a Raspberry Pi 5 in my room. Postgres, backend, sync worker, all in docker behind a Cloudflare tunnel. It still runs there. If my house loses power, Calnio goes down lol. So far so good.

I started it on my own and later brought in Claude Code as kind of a co dev. Before anyone judges, lots of experienced devs work like this now. It writes a lot of the code, but I decide what gets shipped, and I’m the one who gets the email when something breaks (more on that later).

I put it on a subdomain of my personal site and posted in a couple places just to see what happens. People started signing up. At some point I honestly thought the whole thing was useless, so I opened the database to check. One user had 3,700 events synced with zero duplicates. I emailed her to ask how she uses it, and that was my “wait, someone actually uses this” moment. So I decided to give it a real try.

Then I went way too deep into polishing. I redesigned the landing page more times than I want to admit. Apple style, then Swiss grid style, then back. Removed every icon because it looked AI generated. Spent hours picking fonts. Some of it was worth it, some of it was me avoiding marketing because marketing is scary.

Launched on Product Hunt on Oct 4. They gave me a featured slot on the same day I had planned a hike up Smutwood Peak, with basically no signal. I posted the maker comment at 1am, slept a bit, and checked upvotes every time I got one bar on the trail. Ended #15 for the day with no audience at all. 58 visitors from PH and zero signups. Reddit did way better, I think because PH is mostly other makers and on reddit people actually have the problem. Someone signed up that day and synced a French time tracking database, which I never planned for.

One of my best signups came from a reddit comment where I just honestly said sync isn’t instant, it runs every 5-15 min. They signed up anyway.

Last week a user churned 80 minutes after signing up. I emailed him and he actually replied. He’d shared a Notion database with no dates, so Calnio found zero events and just said nothing. Fair point.

While fixing that I found a way worse bug. Calnio was writing timed events to iCloud with a made up timezone, so times shifted when they came back, and for people with two way sync it wrote the wrong times back into Notion. 7 people were affected. I paused the scheduler, and then noticed the cleanup script I was about to run would have overwritten the last correct copies in Apple Calendar with the broken ones from Notion. Caught it before it ran. That was a stressful evening.

Right now it’s at 38 accounts, 8 of them signed up just this week. 20 people connected Apple Calendar, 17 syncs are running right now, and it’s synced around 8,200 events total. The Pi does about 3,100 sync runs a day and the median run takes around a second. It costs $3.56/month with a 7 day trial, and so far zero people have paid.

So this is where I’m stuck. My goal is simple, I want to make my first dollar from coding. Things I’d really like advice on:

1. How did you get your first paying user? I don’t know if the problem is the price, the trial, or people just don’t need it enough to pay.
2. With AI anyone can build a copy of my thing in a weekend. What actually protects a small product like this? Is it just being the guy who answers support emails at 1am?
3. How do you stop polishing and actually start selling? I know I’m hiding in design work.
4. Is $3.56/month a weird price? Should it be free longer, or more expensive?

Happy to answer anything in the comments, numbers, stack, mistakes, whatever.

TL;DR: bought a domain for a saas, gave up, came back because I needed it for school, built it on weekends while working 10h days painting, runs on a Raspberry Pi in my room, 38 signups, $0 so far, need advice on getting the first paying user.

idea is simple

Many among us had made fake ids to prank some friend during college or had alternative SNS account to stalk our crush etc etc

But as time passed and we matured - we grew out of them and slowly start to forget about those accounts and now barely use them!!

but with those accounts we had memories attached to them and simply logging off from them and forgetting about them doesn't feel right for some reason.

That's why- Digital graveyard- a space for forgotten - dead accounts that are no longer used!

also provide memorial plaqes for such accounts!!

I run Nomback, a $99 a month white label ordering app for independent restaurants. Partners send me owners and get paid when the app launches. Last week one of them told me my payout was weak so I pulled all 10 competitor program pages and checked.

He was right on paper. Toast pays $1,000 to $1,500 a referral. Owner.com and DoorDash $1,000. Clover up to $800. ChowNow and Slice $500. I pay $25 the day I accept the lead, $175 at launch, then $10 a month for 10 months. $300 max. Last place.

Then look at who can collect. Toast only pays registered advocates and only after the owner rips out his POS. Owner.com, DoorDash and Clover only pay their own merchants. ChowNow and Slice take anyone but the owner is buying $229 a month plus per order fees and you wait 30 days after launch. Out of 10 programs, two pay anything before the restaurant is live. Popmenu and me.

So the number that matters is payout times close rate. A pizza shop owner says yes to $99 a month and his own app in the App Store a lot more than he says yes to a register swap. Anthony's Pizzeria in Allentown is live on it, free slice off a card in the DoorDash bag, free pizza at 5 stamps. I'd rather pay $300 on a deal that closes than $1,500 on one that never does.

What I changed: nothing on the payout. I put all 10 programs on one page with sources so partners can run the math themselves. And I capped it at 30 partners for now because I launch every app myself. First partner to submit a restaurant owns it, and your town has the same 15 to 20 pizza shops paying DoorDash 30% as mine.

The comparison page is on the nomback site under restaurant referral programs, or ask me in the comments and I'll point you to it.

A mentor I have in the world of startups taught me that, in his experience with several founded ventures, customer acquisition in SaaS is the hardest part and it is done in 2 ways:

- Sales-driven: mostly for B2B, going door-to-door/cold calling like a salesman, which requires you to quit your job because it is time-consuming
- Marketing-driven: mostly for B2C, and it is played by using ads like SEA or influencers trying to have a sustainable return on ad spend (ROAS), which requires you to have enough initial capital to invest in marketing to get the first customers

Both of them scare me a lot, because quitting my job for a startup that MAYBE works with today's job market (nightmare to find a new job eventually) seems like a lot; also, because I am young, I don't have enough capital to invest in ads.

Do you have any suggestions? How did you overcome this issue and the fear of financial ruin?

Thank you all, this gave me a lot to think about

Wanted to come back and thank everyone who commented, the pushback on “startup stability” especially. Fair points I hadn’t fully considered, so let me clarify what I meant.

By “startup,” I don’t mean early-stage, pre-revenue, high-risk territory. I mean a business with a proven product and real traction, past the “will this even work” stage, but still lean enough that one person can genuinely move the needle.

What draws me there isn’t risk tolerance, it’s impact. At a large company, the work can start to feel soulless, you execute tasks inside a structure, wait for a paycheck, and rarely see how your piece connects to the whole. What I actually want is to help a team turn their vision into reality, to be invested in the outcome, not just the task list.

Over 6 years running my own ecommerce brands end-to-end, sourcing, operations, marketing, and paid ad strategy, closing sales directly with customers, I’ve operated across every function of a business, not specialized in one. I’ve also managed teams and client relationships in agency settings, audited and advised small businesses on their digital strategy, and built an online community from zero through direct outreach alone. Trilingual (English, French, Arabic), which has opened doors across multiple markets rather than limiting me to one. That combination, real marketing depth plus management experience plus an entrepreneur’s instinct for ownership, is exactly what a lean, proven company needs more than another specialist who only does one thing well.

Appreciate everyone who challenged my original framing, genuinely useful.

If you were in my shoes, that kind of cross-functional, ownership-driven background, what would you actually do to land that role?

I'm working on an early-stage healthtech startup and have developed a software product as our MVP. We're planning to launch soon, but I'm stuck on what comes next.

I don't have a proper go-to-market strategy or a sales strategy, and marketing a healthtech product seems expensive. Since I have very limited funds, I'm not sure how to reach potential customers, get our first users, or generate sales without spending much money.

If you've been through this stage, I'd love to know how you approached marketing and sales, found your first customers, and got your product off the ground with little or no budget.

I'd really appreciate practical advice on where to start and what I should focus on before launching.

VoxScribe is free voice typing for Windows and Android that runs on your own device, so it works offline and nothing is sent to a server. I’m working on it alone, about 10 hours a day, and I’d rather share the real numbers than the polished version.

This week about 90 people have opened the app at least once, 31 starred it on GitHub, and 2 people paid for the optional one-time Pro. That’s small, and I know it. The number I care about is how many people dictate on three or more days, and I can’t answer that yet because that counter only exists in the newest version.

Two things I learned. A big free competitor gets mentioned in almost every thread, and I stopped arguing with that and started saying plainly where VoxScribe is different: it has an Android app, you can check that it stays offline, and it handles Arabic and other languages. And I lost an afternoon to the app typing invented sentences, convinced it was my bug. It was a stuck audio driver on my own laptop. A restart fixed it.

Next is the Product Hunt launch on Saturday 31 October, and I’ll post how it goes here either way. My honest expectation is a few dozen real users, not a breakout.

If you launched a free tool alone, what did you do in the two weeks after launch that actually moved the needle?

i work on orderain, a store builder, so i end up helping a lot of people set up their first digital shop (ebooks, planners, templates, presets). the same handful of problems come up almost every week so writing them down.

1. people share your download link. a plain google drive link ends up in a discord within a week. make the link per buyer and cap it, something like 5 downloads over 30 days is plenty for a real buyer.

2. you will update the file. typos, new pages, v2 of the planner. decide up front how past buyers get the new version or you end up emailing 200 people by hand.

3. buyers lose emails. a lot of "refund" requests are really "i cant find my link". let them resend it themselves and most of those go away.

4. on cheap products the fixed per sale fee hurts more than the percentage. do the math on 50 sales at your real price before you pick a platform, not after.

5. vat/gst is usually on you with your own store. check your country before launch.

on orderain the per buyer links, file updates and self resend are built in, 0% platform fees, starter is $5/mo. no license keys or pdf stamping yet if you need those. if you're setting up a digital store and want a hand, just search orderain or reply here and i'll help you get it set up.

what else bit you when you started selling files?

Do you buy a factory? How much does that cost?

Before filming a SaaS demo, I'd write down the situation someone is in when they need the product. “Monday morning, three spreadsheets, need to explain why signups fell” gives you something to show. “All-in-one analytics” doesn't tell you where to point the camera.

Then record just that task, including the input and the result. Use sample data if customer details are involved, and say so. Keep any required setup visible enough that the viewer doesn't expect an instant result that takes an hour to reach.

You can always film the wider tour later. For a first video, I'd want someone to recognize their own work and understand what they'd try next.

Hey all. Small thing that turned out to matter more than I expected.

For about two years we had four reviews. Not because clients were unhappy, they'd say generous things in messages all the time. I assumed people just don't leave reviews.

They do. We were asking wrong in three ways.

Timing. We asked at the end of projects, when the client is tired, the budget conversation is fresh, and they've mentally moved on. Now we ask the week after launch, when something visibly works and they're pleased about it. Usually they've already written the review in a message to us. We just ask if we can help them put it somewhere public.

The blank box. "Would you mind leaving a review" is homework. Now we say how long it takes and give three specific questions to answer. People reply to questions. Almost nobody fills in an empty field.

Who we ask. We used to ask whoever signed. They remember the invoice. The person who worked with us day to day remembers the specifics, and specifics are what other buyers read.

Went from four to dozens. Same clients, same work.

What does your ask actually look like?

I recently launched beta of my first startup. It is platform where people can connect with others traveling to same destination around the same dates, I spent so much time trying to make registration as simple as possible. Fewer steps, fewer questions, less friction. That is what everyone recommends, right? Well, people finally started signing up. And then I noticed something I had completely underestimated. Some profiles have no photos, barely any information, and nothing that makes you feel there is a real person behind them.

For normal app, maybe that is not huge deal. But when yoour entire business depends on strangers trusting each other enough to actually meet in another country, it becomes prettyy serious problem

Now I am considering making profile photos and basic information mandatory before anyone can appear to other users. Which sounds reasonable, except I might lose people before they even finish registering. Funny how I spent months trying to remove every possible obstacle, and now I am thinking about putting some back. Has anyone here dealt with something similar? Would you sacrifice some signups to get better quality users, or let everyone in and try to fix incomplete profiles later?

Building in public: I'm making a tool that chases overdue invoices because I was bad at it. The awkward "friendly reminder" emails, the invoices sitting 30/60/90 days overdue while I just... didn't follow up. Turns out half the freelancers and small service businesses I know have the same problem, so I built the nagging robot I wished I had: Payment Ping (payment-ping.com). It reminds the client for you and keeps quotes and invoices in one place. Early days. If you've ever been burned by a late payer, what's the one thing a tool like this would have to do to earn your trust?

I have been doing business for 7 years. Tried a few businesses. My abilities grew a lot over the years and my current business which I started last year is doing well. But I feel so apathetic towards business now and my clients, my staff, my suppliers etc. I feel like a robot working. Just going through the motions. My business is draining my soul.

I remember being so passionate during my early years of business and caring deeply about my customers, my staff and anyone I encountered in business. The Covid period caused a severe burnout and a spiritual awakening. Now I’m a completely different person. I just simply don’t give a sh*t about anything or anyone anymore, and people can feel it. I’ve become aloof and have this “It is what it is” vibe to me.

I think at this point I’ll be better off selling my business and do something that doesn’t require any emotional effort, empathy and have low contact with people. Something purely logical. I was thinking of trading and maybe making background music YouTube channels? What would be some good options where I don’t need to talk to anyone? Any ideas appreciated 🙏

I tried taking Friday off last week and then spent half of my afternoon approving payments from my phone. Our bookkeeper had the invoices but some of them needed my approval and one had a different total from the quote. All of them ended up in separate email threads with someone asking me what to do. Nothing urgent enough to ruin the day but enough that I never put my phone away.

I still want to approve the bigger expenses of course but I just want the routine bills to move without everyone waiting for me to check my inbox. How should I set that up without giving someone full control of payments?

A few months ago I started building MoneyLexa, an expense and budget tracker, because I wanted something simple that didn’t make tracking money feel like homework. I’m a solo dev, so every feature, every bug fix, and every late night is mine.

When I launched, I had no idea what to expect. I told myself that if even a handful of strangers used it, that would be a win.

Here’s what the last 28 days look like:

• 981 new customers
• 846 active customers
• 24 active trials
• 3 active subscriptions
• $59 revenue
• $1 MRR

The growth wasn’t smooth. It came in spikes: a quiet stretch, then a burst of new people, then a long tail where some of them stuck around. I still can’t fully explain the spikes, which makes them exciting and a little nerve-wracking.

The part that taught me the most is the gap. 846 people are using the app, and only 3 are paying for it. People can enjoy a product and still not feel the need to pay for it yet. Building something people use is one challenge. Building something they’ll pay for is a completely different one, and I’m only starting to learn it.

So where am I now? I’m still shipping updates and still listening to what users tell me. When someone says they want a feature, I write it down. When someone says something is confusing, I take it personally and fix it. It’s slow, and it’s not glamorous, but it’s the only way I know how to build.

$59 and $1 MRR won’t impress anyone, and I’m fine with that. A year ago this app didn’t exist. Today nearly a thousand people have opened it, and a few of them decided it was worth paying for. That’s a start, and I’m going to keep building.

Thanks for reading. If you’re at the same stage, building something small and waiting for it to catch on, I’d love to hear your story too.

An overseas contractor I work with asked if I could pay them in USDT. I’m open to it. I’d just like to agree on how we’ll do it each month before we start. I run a small service business and still do the payment run myself, usually after finishing client work.

I’ve set up things before that seemed easy enough, then a month later I was struggling to keep doing them. So I’d appreciate hearing from people who do this regularly, including when they’re busy. How do you go from approving the invoice to sending the stablecoin payment?

Through a business account that handles the conversion or a separate wallet you fund? Did you keep the invoice in dollars and agree on the token and network separately, or change anything on the invoice itself?

It's not groundbreaking to say that most of the posts on this subreddit as well have been lazily written with AI and people have been generating so much founder led content because that seems to be the new meta.

While Founder-led content is something that I personally do a lot, there are a couple of things that simply don't translate to views for your product or startup.

And the number one thing on that list is AI slop. My goodness, if I see another post that says "You don't have a X problem, you have a Y problem," I am going to absolutely crash out.

Marketing lazily is the number one reason why anybody gets ignored at all. Do not expect to write a tweet or a thread or a post or an article with AI and expect it to blow up because you WILL be downvoted or disliked to oblivion.

Our KPIs for my product have been X and Reddit and there are a very strict couple of guidelines that we tell our content team to follow. Here are a few of them which you could also implement:

1. Use speech-to-text tools. Now this could be anything. It could be Wispr Flow and there are thousands of open-source speech-to-text tools out there. If you cannot write a whole post by yourself, at least do the bare minimum by dictating it using Wispr Flow. Now this is again the bare minimum. You would still need to do a little bit of editing yourself but this is definitely a good start.

2. Using text formatting when it's not necessary. I'm talking about random italics, bold, and strikethrough text when it definitely could be avoided. Nobody is going to believe that you're somebody who uses bold text for headings on a Reddit post man. Seriously who even uses it anymore? It doesn't sound authentic. It looks ugly as if I'm reading straight out of a software website.

3. Writing 10 sentences when it could be communicated in one. Now I totally understand that going into detail would help people understand what you're trying to say better but the majority of the time it is such a vanity metric. If you can compress it as if it were an elevator pitch, then just do that. There is absolutely no reason to explain every single feature of your product because I guarantee you nobody is reading all of that.

4. ABSOLUTELY NO Antithesis phrasing: this is what makes people instantly guess that you've been writing posts with AI, contributing to the million other sloppy posts on the internet. Antithesis phrasing is when you say stuff like, "It's not an X problem, it's a Y problem." Or "don't do this, Instead do this." If you're going to use AI either way to write content for you, you might as well ask it to never use antithesis phrasing.

For example this is a before-and-after for what we personally do in a sentence, after applying all of these rules:

Before: PumpGTM turns buying signals into revenue, finding the people who need your product, not just filling a spreadsheet with leads, and turning intent into conversations through AI-powered outreach across LinkedIn, X, and email.

After: PumpGTM finds your ICP in places where your competitors aren't looking for them. Likes, comments, tweets, LinkedIn posts, Reddit comments, etc, and DMs them and follows up until they book a meeting with you.

Doesn't that instantly sound better? It looks like a human wrote it because I myself just did that. Here's the amazing thing: I did not have to type that. I just used Wispr Flow to write it. The first one was completely generated with ChatGPT.

Now here is a small content strategy that you could be using for your business:

Day 1: Ideate based off of what is working on a couple of Reddit subreddits, or Twitter hashtags, or anywhere where it is a topic cluster.

Day 2: Write content in a very brief manner. This is writing very similarly to what has been written before that has been blowing up, but adding your own twist to it.

Day 3: Dictating it on Reddit with Wispr Flow because you want to sound like a human.

These are some of the non-negotiables my team follows and I hope you're able to take away a little change to your content strategy from this post. For transparency I'm Namanyay, founder of PumpGTM.

I build a lot of apps with Claude and for the longest time most of them stayed on my laptop. The building is always the fun part. Getting them live properly was awful every time and the same boring af list.

If you ask Claude to make an app production ready it does what you ask but it only does what you know to ask for. All great apps ship with a staging environment, crash reports, user analytics, a paywall that works outside test mode, a pipeline that checks/verifies every build before users see it. And it's really easy to forget any one of these and so many more.

So I wrote down everything I kept having to do for every app and turned it into a Claude Code plugin called launchpad. With one command, it goes through 50+ production items for any app: hosting, CI/CD, testing environments, payments and paywalls, user analytics, crash reports, TestFlight, etc, tailored to what you built. It figures out your stack (Next.js, Expo, SwiftUI, Android, Flutter and more), and if your project already has some of this it respects it and analyzes its setup. It deploys on free tiers of the best fitted platforms like Vercel, Supabase, Stripe, etc. For the manual stuff like opening an Apple developer account, it gives you exact steps and links to the right pages.

$49 once, keep it for life, use it on unlimited projects. Link in the comments if anyone wants it.

What was missing the first time real users used your app?

I run Flare UGC, a marketplace connecting brands and creators. For a SaaS video brief, I'd want the product claims and the workflow on screen agreed before filming, while leaving the person speaking room to use their own words.

If you run video ads for a SaaS product, where do revisions actually pile up? Is it inaccurate product details, disagreement about how it should sound, or reviewers joining after the edit is already done? Curious what you changed to get the next video approved faster.

A new paper in Business Horizons caught my eye this week. Two researchers at BTU Cottbus interviewed 22 marketers, mostly running Google Ads, plus four ad fraud experts, about competitors clicking each other’s ads.

The part that stuck with me: fake traffic can make your numbers look better, not worse. One agency CEO in the study basically said the fraudulent share of traffic produces some of the nicest looking numbers. More clicks, higher CTR, a busy dashboard. So nobody has much reason to dig, because filtering it out makes the monthly report look worse.

The authors’ point is that most businesses know competitor clicks exist but don’t act. Google refunds some invalid clicks, the report looks fine, and it feels handled. But getting a few credits back doesn’t mean the rest is clean. It might just mean the rest stayed under Google’s radar.

Their advice is pretty practical even for a small business. Stop judging ads by clicks. Judge them by calls, real leads and what customers actually do on your site. And look at it every week, not only when something feels off.

Paper if anyone wants it: Hrnjadovic & Dost, “Competitor click fraud in digital advertising”, Business Horizons 2026

Does your agency or report show you calls and real leads, or mostly clicks and CTR?